


Photographic Memory

by Nikkie2571



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood Marriage Proposal, Childhood Promises, Crying, Gen, Happy Ending, Homelessness, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Photography, Swearing, Theft, childhood marriage promise, happy crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 16:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20997482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nikkie2571/pseuds/Nikkie2571
Summary: Jacqin met a boy a long time ago, a boy who asked Jacqin to marry him. Jacqin didn't say no, but he didn't say yes either.





	Photographic Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Brightest Blue Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/746341) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 

“Stop that boy!” The policeman shouts, turning the heads of everyone nearby as Jacqin flees with the spoils of his mission. Buried in his pocket, its weight lying against his leg was a stolen wallet, filled with cash ready to be spent. Jacqin giggled to himself as he turned a corner into an alley. He was small and fast, and the police had never caught him before. They wouldn’t do so today.

Quickly, Jacqin sp around and hides behind the nearby trashcan, where his disguise sat. As fast as he could, Jacqin donned the baseball cap, overly large jacket, and mirrored sunglasses, hiding as much of himself as possible. He then picked up his backpack and started slowly walking west just as the policeman burst out of the alley.

“You there! Kid!” The policeman exclaims. “Have you seen a boy, maybe a bit shorter than you, running from here?”

Jacqin turns around and faces the police, nodding his head.

“I was very surprised, sir, when he showed up. He nearly ran into me! After that, he took off in that direction!” Jacqin says, pointing east.

The policeman nods. “Thank you!” He says, and then he was off.

Jacqin giggles to himself again and then runs down the south road, towards safety, towards home. He dodges around dumpsters and vagrants and turns to the west, into another alley, speeding up as he feels himself drawing closer to his destination.

WHACK!

Pain laces up and down Jacqin’s front, his chest aching from where he had collided with a smaller body. In slow motion, he tracks the motion of the object the child had been holding as it plummets to the ground, and at the last second, he catches it, saving it from a horrid fate.

“ _ Oh, je suis tellement désolé! _ ” Jacqin gasps, the french just leaking out of his mouth.

“M-my camera!” The child exclaims. “You saved it!”

Looking down at it for a moment, Jacqin is surprised to realize he was too focused on catching the camera to realize that it was one.

Jacqin holds the camera out to the, he guesses it’s a boy, judging by the overalls and rather plain sneakers, as he draws a genuinely sheepish expression onto his face.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he says, “I should have been looking where I was going. Thankfully I caught it though, cameras are expensive.”

The young boy, he was maybe 8 or 9 just blinks up at him, mouth gaping in shock.

Jacqin tilts his head curiously. “Are… you okay, kid?”

The boy’s face turns darker and he starts to stutter nonsense a bit before yelling “your eyes are really pretty!”

Jacqin blinks and feels his expression drop as he raises a hand to his face, finding that his sunglasses must have fallen off when he collided with this child. Not that it matters much, the kid doesn’t know who he is, but the point of a disguise is not to lose it. He looks around for a moment before finding them and stuffing them into a pocket.

Jacqin looks back at the boy to see that he is fiddling with the hem of his chest pocket, looking down at his shoes. He’s nervous for some reason.

“C-can I take your picture, please?” The boy asks, voice wobbly and adorable.

Jacqin smiles and finally hands the boy his camera. He can humour a kid for a bit. “Sure, kid, go ahead.”

The boy’s face erupts into a wide-open smile, revealing that he’s just starting to grow in his second column of teeth. “Ah, thank you!” He nearly shouts.

He then raises the camera and immediately shoots a picture, not even looking through the view to check if it looks alright. Jacqin can’t help but think of him as exciteable.

The boy lowers the camera, still smiling, but then it drops, seeming to notice they’re still in the mouth of a dirty alley.

“C-can we go to-, to the park?” he stutters out. “I can t-take better pictures there.”

Jacqin grabs the kid’s hand. “As long as you tell me your name, kid.”

The boy’s smile erupts again and he starts leading Jacqin towards the nearby playground. “My name is Keano! Kay-ee-ay-en-oh! I’m 9!”

Jacqin nods. “I’m Jacqin, that’s jay-ay-see-ai-en, and I’m 14 years old. You can call me Jackie if you want.”

“Eh, Jackie,” says a voice jacqin didn’t want to be hearing right now. “Who’s this, your brother? Your  _ boyfriend? _ ”

Jacqin turns around to face Lucas, the guy he’s been paying to have a room at night for the past year. He’s smirking at him as if he caught Jacqin in the middle of something secret.

“First of all, dude,” Jacqin starts, “he’s a little kid, so he’s not my boyfriend, and second, here’s your money for the week, so fuck off.” He pulls out the wallet he stole and hands over forty of the over two hundred dollars in it.

Lucas holds the bills in his fingers, rubbing them between the pads of his thumb and pointer finger. “Mm, I don’t know, kid, I think you owe me more than this,” he says with a menacing smile.

Jacqin knows he’s lying, but he hands him an extra twenty anyway. “Fuck you.”

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, fuck you too,” he replies before turning around and leaving.

Jacqin moves to also turn back to Keano, but Lucas starts talking again as he walks away.

“If I ever find out you bring a boy over though, I’m kicking you out!”

Jacqin cups his hands over his face. “Fuck you! He’s not my boyfriend!”

Lucas just flips him off.

Jacqin sighs and turns back to Keano, who looks scared, and also a little cold, judging by the way he’s shivering.

“Keano, do you… not own a jacket?”

Keano shakes his head. “Not after my mom bought me this camera,” he says sadly.

Jacqin feels pity well up inside him. “Well…”

Jacqin takes off his jacket. “Here,” he says, holding it out, smiling despite the chill in the air. “This used to belong to my dad, but you can have it, as payment for me almost breaking your camera.”

Keano’s eyes widen to the size of loonies. “B-but, don’t you want to keep it!?”

Jacqin shakes his head with a sort of sad smile placed on his face. “My dad wasn’t the best person… Besides, I’ve been looking for an excuse to get a new one.”

It would help make him less known to police if he ever has to disguise himself again too, which is a plus.

With tentative and shaking hands, Keano reaches out and grabs the coat before sliding his arms into it’s way too big for him sleeves. He’s smiling, face pinker than would be excusable from cold.

“You’re really nice,” he comments as he rubs his face into the fluffy collar of the jacket.

Keano then straightens up, the lightbulb over his head practically visible with how wide his eyes and mouth are.

“Will you marry me!?” He shouts.

Jacqin takes a step back in shock before swallowing some calmness back into his system.

“Well…” He starts to say.

“Pleeeeeeeaaaaaaaseeeeee!” Keano says, drawing out the vowels for far longer than necessary.

Jacqin is fairly sure it would kill this kid to hear a ‘no’, so he quickly comes up with a way to get out of this without hurting him.

“Um… how about this,” he says, “getting married is a very adult thing to do, so, the day that jacket fits you is the day I agree to marry you, does that work?

Keano seems to think it through for a moment, looking disappointed, but thankfully not outright sad. “I-I guess that works.”

Jacqin takes Keano’s hand again. “Now, come on, you have some more pictures to take, don’t you?”

Keano smiles wide up at him. “Yeah!”

* * *

Jacqin is in a coffee shop, over a decade later, when he hears it, the TV is turned to the news and they’re doing an interview with an up-and-coming photographer about his new gallery.

“My pictures are all about the beauty of humanity in the ugliest places. Homeless mothers kissing their children, people who work every day in horrid environments just for the betterment of someone else, or who, despite their murky past, are still able to do something kind.”

“And what inspired you to take these pictures?”

“Well, I didn’t realize it at the time, I was 8 or so after all, but there was this boy in his early teens who ran into me in an alley and he caught the camera I dropped in the collide, it was nearly new and a gift from my mother and I was very grateful. He looked genuinely sorry about it.”

The man takes in a deep breath, and Jackie freezes as he listens, feeling his memory surge and brain work overdrive. The man on the TV releases his breath after what feels like hours of emotional electricity coursing through Jackie’s body, sounding sad, and perhaps wistful. 

“I think he was homeless, or at least unfortunate, cuz some strange man came up to him demanding payment and talking about kicking him out. This guy was definitely not that man’s son, by the way. Anyway, I was cold and this kid, this teenager, Jackie, gives me his coat, and I’m such a gobsmacked kid, receiving all this kindness from a pretty stranger, that I ask him to marry me, and he doesn’t even outright deny me, just dodges with a ‘someday’. It wasn’t until years later that I figured just how lucky I was in that encounter, how badly it could have gone, and just what was going on at the time. How beautiful this stranger was, not just outside, but in, despite his seemingly awful situation.”

Jackie feels like crying a little, his tears welling up as he remembers a small boy in overalls and sneakers, a boy he had given his father’s jacket.  
“I take it you never saw that ‘Jackie’ again, then?” The reporter asks Keano.

“No, not at all,” Keano replies, “but I still have his coat, and the pictures I took of him that night. In fact, they’re part of the gallery, since they inspired its entire theme.”

“Anything else you want to say about the gallery, Keano, before we end this segment?”

Keano takes a deep breath. “If Jackie is out there, I want to see him again. To show him what he made me into.”

The reporter laughs. “Well, if that isn’t cute! Anyway, all you folks out there, make sure you come to the Ridgelet Art Museum to see the ‘Beauty of Discordance’ Gallery…”

Jackie tunes out the TV, feeling like his body is full of static, full of pain, full of joy.

He needs to see Keano again.

* * *

The tickets are expensive, more than he would have wanted to spend, but it was worth it. The pictures are all beautiful, each with a story on a plaque next to it. A beat-up truck taking an injured dog to the vet, a hungry man spending all his money to feed his three kids, children making instruments out of trash, a homeless woman giving her umbrella to a man who lost his.

And then he finds the pictures of himself. The story beside them is very accurate, reading just as Jackie remembers the events, though the condition Jackie gave about the jacket is suspiciously missing. He feels a little overwhelmed realizing just what kind of impact he had on this kid, on Keano.

“How are you liking the gallery?” Asks a voice.

Jackie turns to see Keano standing beside him, looking sadly at the pictures of the teen Jackie used to be.

“I love it,” Jackie replies. “I just have one question…”

Keano turns to face him. “And what’s that?”

Jackie takes in a deep breath. “Does it fit?

Keano blinks. “What?”

Jackie smiles. “Does the jacket fit? I promised to marry you if it did.”

Keano’s mouth falls open and his eyes go wide, tears forming in the corners of them. “Oh my god! It-, it’s you!”

Jackie smiles wider. “Oui, c’est moi,” he replies.

Keano’s breath hitches and then he releases a soft sob, his tears falling as he smiles, his eyes soft and bright. “I thought I would never see you again… th-the chances…”

Jackie shakes his head. “I thought so too, and I honestly thought that you would play a very small part of my life, but… here I am.”

Keano laughs. “Oh god… you…”

Jackie interrupts him. “You didn’t answer me by the way.”

“Hm?”

Jackie snickers. “Does the jacket fit, Keano?”

Keano blushes, face turning darker. He’s nervous again. “Y-yes, it does.”

Jackie tilts his head, feeling his heart trying to beat out of his chest despite how calmly he’s acting. “Well, I don’t know about marriage, but… would you like to go on a date tomorrow?”

Keano burst into tears as he nods. “Oh my gosh, of course!”

Jackie laughs and pulls him into a hug.

Keano is giggling softly right into his ear. “You, you’re so important to me and I-I don’t even know your full name!”

“Jacqin Boisnoir,” Jackie replies.

Keano just laughs some more before pulling out of the hug. “H-how did you even remember after so long? The only reason I did is because I kept a journal, though I doubt I would have needed it, considering my mum tells me I didn’t shut up for two whole weeks about being engaged.”

Jackie snickers to himself. “You could say I have a photographic memory.”

Keano laughs so hard that he falls to the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like my stories you can come join my discord! discord.gg/tBGA5fU


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